dilettante

Definition of dilettante

1: a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge : dabblerMr. Carroll often criticizes the superficial lives of the dilettantes … who mingle in New York.— Mark StevensWhitman ran an amateurish campaign … and was painted as an aristocratic dilettante.— Eleanor Clift

2dated : an admirer or lover of the arts
It was unparalleled, undreamed-of, that I, Humphrey Van Weyden, a scholar and a dilettante, if you please, in things artistic and literary, should be lying here on a Bering Sea seal-hunting schooner.— Jack London

Synonyms & Antonyms for dilettante

Choose the Right Synonym for dilettante

amateur, dilettante, dabbler, tyro mean a person who follows a pursuit without attaining proficiency or professional status. amateur often applies to one practicing an art without mastery of its essentials
a painting obviously done by an amateur
; in sports it may also suggest not so much lack of skill but avoidance of direct remuneration.
remained an amateur despite lucrative offers dilettante may apply to the lover of an art rather than its skilled practitioner but usually implies elegant trifling in the arts and an absence of serious commitment.
had no patience for dilettantesdabbler suggests desultory habits of work and lack of persistence.
a dabbler who started novels but never finished them tyro implies inexperience often combined with audacity with resulting crudeness or blundering.
shows talent but is still a mere tyro

Examples of dilettante in a Sentence

I recently spent a week in Alaska trying to learn how to be a mountaineer. I did not succeed very well, and the details are not very interesting. I finished the course (I was enrolled in a course) thinking that perhaps I am better off remaining a slightly-above-average mountain dilettante. An occasional rock climber.— Jason Lee Steorts, National Review, 18 Aug. 2008Being a powerhouse herself in ways that make today's feminist superwomen look like dilettantes, she inevitably clashed with star directors like Maurice Tourneur and Ernst Lubitsch.— Molly Haskell, New York Times Book Review, 6 June 1999Most of the articles published in Naval History reflect time-consuming research and investigation. The efforts are not the work of dilettantes, but of professional and semiprofessional historians.— Michael M. Bergfeld, Naval History, July/August 1997
You can always tell a true expert from a dilettante.
she writes about art not from the point of view of an artist but from that of a committed dilettante

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'dilettante.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.